What were the possibilities of prose as a literary medium in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? And how did it operate in the literary and social worlds? The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World brings together ten new essays by leading scholars of the literatures of England, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, and the colonial Americas, to answer these questions in wide-ranging ways. Several of the essays shed new light on landmark prose works of the period; some discuss what lesser-known writings reveal about the medium; others move between the literary and the...

What were the possibilities of prose as a literary medium in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? And how did it operate in the literary and social worlds? The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World brings together ten new essays by leading scholars of the literatures of England, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, and the colonial Americas, to answer these questions in wide-ranging ways. Several of the essays shed new light on landmark prose works of the period; some discuss what lesser-known writings reveal about the medium; others move between the literary and the...

Chaucer introduces the characters of the Knight and the Prioress in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Beginning with these familiar figures, Elizabeth Fowler develops a new method of analyzing literary character. She argues that words generate human figures in our reading minds by reference to paradigmatic cultural models of the person. These models such as the pilgrim, the conqueror, the maid, the narrator originate in a variety of cultural spheres. A concept Fowler terms the "social person" is the key to understanding both the literary details of specific characterizations and...